


Hands

by lotesse



Category: Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Hand porn, Juvenilia, M/M, Post-Quest, Purple Prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-10-20
Updated: 2004-10-20
Packaged: 2017-10-09 03:53:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/82736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An ordinary observer would say that Sam's hands were dirty and rough, but in that gasping, out-of-time moment he sees the truth: Sam's hands are clean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hands

His hands used to be beautiful. Never very useful, not at all like Sam's, but aesthetically pleasing under all the inkblots. Once there were long, slender fingers and smooth, pale palms. Now there are only wasted spiders, sickly and swollen. The joints in his fingers ache if he writes for too long, and the flesh around the bitten nails is angry and red. And the fourth finger of his right hand…he can't bear to look at it, can't let his mind stray even in its direction. The hideous lump of mangled skin and blood and bone sits on his pale hand like a leech, a festering darkness threatening to engulf him.

He should go out in the sun with Merry and Pippin; he knows that well enough. His skin is too pale, too pale and gaunt, stretched tight over the luminous bone. He shivers as it hits him: the name of the unnamable disgust that turns his stomach and darkens his thoughts every time he sees the hands that dangle at the ends of his slender arms. They have become Gollum's hands. His fingers and palms now bear witness to the darkness that has taken him, turned him, twining into him through that gaping stump that sits parasitically where his fourth finger used to be.

He can't bear to look at them anymore, and so he lets his gaze wander about the room. He is in a spire of rock built into the seventh circle of the city, the city that circles and circles like a spider with its prey. The stones are all so pale without these sunsets…it's as if the blood that the setting sun paints them with has been drained away by a fatal wound. By the war that they fought for him. The war that he could not win for them.

Footsteps, knuckles rapping against the heavy wooden door. He moans, and in swings noiselessly open, the hinges gliding like sharp-prowed ships through glass-calm water. Light shines through the doorway, dazzling his shrinking eyes, and it is more than a moment before he can make out Sam, standing there quietly, waiting for him. How did he know, how did he always know when he was in need? Always. The gardener stands sturdily besides the writing desk that he's appropriated for his own use, and he thinks rather feverishly that Sam alone looks as if he's really standing on the ground. He doesn't feel that he often does, his body still wispy and thin from the malnourishment of so many days upon days. Sam looks at him, somehow knows that he can't speak, can't make the words take on his intended shapes. Sometimes he feels that they wield him, the words, and it's all he can do to keep himself in their torrent. Sam looks at him and knows what's wrong.

Sam kneels down and tenderly helps him out of the too-big human chair, wood hacked and bent into a cradle that confined his own broken body, pulling him down to curl up on the floor. The stone is cold, and he huddles close to the sweet-smelling warmth of Sam's flesh, the blood coursing under the scourged skin like a river, like beams of pure sunlight on the fields of the Marish. He can't speak, but his bent, knotted fingers grasp futilely at the oh-so-empty air. He turns his head away, unable to look at the foulness of those long bones that hung from his narrow wrists like the corpses, the rotting, bound flesh caught in the webs in…the webs…no…

But Sam's arms are wrapping around him, Sam's hands running up and down his aching body, and his mind reels back to sanity, catching itself out of inarticulate madness. Sam's hands. His mind focuses on them; he sees them with strange clarity. An ordinary observer would say that Sam's hands were dirty and rough, but in that gasping, out-of-time moment he sees the truth. Sam's hands are clean. The earth trapped beneath his fingernails has cleansed them, not like his own. His hands are unstained by dirt, but sometimes he can still see the rusty buildup of blood-Sam's blood, Smeagol's blood, his blood-beneath the bitten nails. His hands are filthy with blood and darkness, deformed and vile. But Sam's beautiful, big-palmed gardener's hands, hands that hold the gift of life-because that's what's in them, he knows it. With Sam it's more than just poetry and fair words and deep metaphors. Sam's hands plant and tend and grow, and they've kept him alive for so long now that he can't remember a time when he didn't know their spiderweb tracery by heart. Sam's hands that are everything, Sam's hands, Sam's sunlight hands that burn without pain against his skin. Against his body Sam's hands are golden. So pale he has become, so pale, his skin like the light of the moon ailing in some slow eclipse, like the light of the haunted tower, unclean and pale and perverted. He looks away sharply.

But Sam will have none of that. One of his work-callused fingers presses against the thin and papery still-blank skin at his throat, so that he can feel the throbbing of his own strange heartbeat against Sam's hands. It is more rhythmic than he would have expected it to be. Gently Sam lifts his head and looks square into his eyes, and he knows that he must meet them. He shudders. When he looks into Sam's eyes he can see the sun and the fire and the water of the Baranduin that he loved, the river that took his mother and father and that he still, still loved. And Sam looks at him and knows, just knows, and gathers him close, fingers tangling in his dark hair.

And then Sam's hands are on his pale body again, running their rough wholeness over the cracks and darkness and scars and imperfections. Their touch is feather-light, gentle and firm and urgent. Sam's hands touch him as if he were perfect, and somehow when they do he believes that he might still be. When Sam's hands cover the scars on his body he can no longer see the scars on his soul. Sam's belief in his perfection and beauty makes him so, if only for an instant. And their touch makes him want perfection and he cries out in need and Sam hushes him with his mouth of soft spring sunlight.

He gasps under that fingerless touch, tender as fading elvish dreams, bright and piercing as the stars. Sam's tongue takes advantage of his open mouth, sliding between his thin, dry lips like a blessed draught of pure water in a land of thirst, and he reaches out to Sam's mouth, to taste and touch in turn. Sam kisses him deeper, harder, as if there's something in him that he still wants, still needs, and he welcomes it, wishing that it was really so. Sam's hands furrow through the skin of his body, gently cupping the slight curves spared by the ravages of Mordor. The blood rushes swift and heady beneath his skin, taking away the sickly pallor for one illusory moment. How is it that one touch can send him reeling like whole bottles full of the Gaffer's home brew? Sam's callused fingers brush against the hollow of his belly, the tips catching on imperceptible ridges of flesh and then skittering smoothly again, gentle and tantalizing and he wants so badly to merge with that touch. His body strains towards Sam's, needing to become one with that wondrous perfection. He moans again, but this time with a different need, no less heavy but a thousand times as rich, like the chocolate that Aragorn took from the beaten Haradrim. Sam knows-Sam always knows-and his eyes are shining like the sun underwater as his hands continue downwards, twining through the soft dark hair at the base of his belly until he wants to scream, to force Sam's hands to move just a few inches lower to where his cock, firm and erect and painfully, painfully desirous, is straining the sensible, hobbit-like cloth of his breeches. He can feel the heat of it, feel the air currents eddying around each of Sam's fingers, and he wants to…so badly…he wants…

Sam's hands, suddenly businesslike, curl around him to contain and to hold and to lift. The bed Sam lays him on is soft with shivery silk, far nicer than the cold stone floor, but he feels bereft of those hands skating over his body like light like light, and Sam knows. They don't speak, make only small and inarticulate noises, and he is glad for it, because the words ride him too hard, too many of them, too big, and he can never control them, can't pin them down or make them leave him be. Sam knows, and between them there is no need of words. He ought to be glad for it, and he is, but he would like to be able to speak again, even if it isn't strictly necessary. Stroking up and down his long neck, the hands make him arch like a cat. Sam chuckles, the resonance shaking the bed ever so slightly, and leans down to plant wet kisses all along his throat. He gasps again, because the air has turned to gold, solidly liquid and unbreathable. Sam's hands cup his throat, siphoning the golden light of the air into his starved body. It makes him dizzy, but he can breath. His body arches like a bowstring with the unbearable tension that makes the red-gold world around him vibrate, shake, shimmer, like water in a clear glass when a finger is dipped into it.

Sam's deft fingers unfasten the buttons on his trousers, brushing against him briefly, although he suspects that it is inadvertent. Each touch makes him squeeze his eyelids shut, and colors burst in light behind them, spreading in rings like the ripples of the air, and every time that Sam's hands and sweet, rough fingers leave his body he feels, if only for an instant, that he will never be able to breathe again. His trousers fall to the floor and Sam's wonderful bright earthy hands clasp him, holding and protecting and fueling a desire greater than his need for air. Those wondrous strong fingers slowly stroke up and down his painfully hard cock, and when he looks up at Sam out of eyes screwed up with desire and need he sees a suspicious light in his eyes, and with a gasp he realizes that Sam is teasing him, and while it spurs on his passion it also plucks a deep, low string of tight pain, that Sam still can tease and be merry, and with him. But not for long, and his need rises up like a great green wave to swamp him, tumble down his towers and destroy his being. Sam's hand is clasped tight around him, and up and down, pulsing through the still and golden air, body turned to bronze in the last light of the dying sun, Sam gently, intently, single-mindedly makes love to him. And then the gold is washing over him, swift and sure and multitudinous, and he cries out Sam's name from the middle of the heart of it. Sam's hands thread gently through his brittle hair, and just at that instant the sun sets. Blue twilight settles. Sam still radiates gold, the sun trapped in his hair and his eyes, body, his hands that cup the light of his own twilit body.

He clasps Sam to himself, still hating the look of his foul hands on that perfect expanse of skin but unable to help himself. He has to pull what remains of that gold into his heart before the twilight comes. He has to hold it tight, before the natural darkness of his soul leeches it all away. His broken hands are, in this at least, all too strong. When one's hands are deformed monstrosities, nothing but the legacy of evil and darkness, gold runs out of them like a sieve. The gaping wound of his finger draws it, siphons the light out of his body.

One of Sam's fingers skitters gently across the insomnia-darkened flesh beneath his eyes, and he realizes that he is crying. He begins to sob, and Sam draws him in close, murmuring soft nothings into his ears. But he knows now. He knows how dark he has become. How is night to love day? The two are mutually exclusive. And he silently curses his hands for making it so.


End file.
